Snarky Repartee

I’m sure just about everyone has heard about this by now, but here are James Watson’s recent comments at the Royal Society in London:

The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

This honestly comes as no great surprise. Ever since reading about the shabby way in which Watson treated Rosalind Franklin in Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, I have had scant respect for him. I am tired of seeing him defended as someone who is willing to make politically incorrect speeches. I really don’t get this. Saying that black people are unintelligent and women who are carrying babies who have a "homosexual gene" should be  allowed to abort them is somehow courageous? Reinforcing biases that already exist about groups of people is in no way courageous. He has made similar comments about the intelligence of women in the past, but apparently people aren’t as terribly shocked by that notion, for they received far less publicity. The worst thing about such comments is that the fact that he’s such a respected scientist validates these ideas. There are plenty of scientists working in the field who are far better qualified to comment on these ideas. I fully support Watson’s freedom of speech to say whatever he wants, but I disagree strongly that he should have been allowed to keep his job at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. There’s no way to know what unsaid assumptions most people in such positions of power hold, but now that we know what Watson thinks I really feel that he shouldn’t be in a position to affect the lives of people whom he seems to hold in such contempt.

Via Feministing, I learnt that this year, girls won the first prizes in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, in both the individual and team categories. That’s really awesome news. So there, Larry Summers. It always irritates me when guys try to use innate differences between men and women to explain away the huge gap between the number of men and women pursuing academic careers. Whatever such differences may be, they are completely insignificant compared to the far fewer opportunities women are offered and the pressure on them to be good wives and mothers above all else.

All this reminds me of my own experiences in high school in India, trying to establish myself in a new school full of very conservative, highly intelligent, extremely motivated students. Until the 10th grade, I went to a very easy-going school, where studying for about half an hour before an exam was enough to do well.  To be suddenly plonked down in this new school, with a different syllabus altogether, and a very different breed of student, was not at all an easy experience. I would do it all again though, because it gave me the confidence to know that I could survive no matter how difficult the environment and taught me the math and science skills I draw upon every day today.

Things were really bad at first. I bombed on the exams that whole first term and I am sure that most of my teachers were convinced that I was a dunderhead. The gender dynamics in that school were really screwed up. Boys and girls rarely talked to each other in school. Even at that age, the boys studying science far outnumbered the girls, while the reverse was true for accounting and finance. While teachers valued and praised the boys who were whip-smart and could solve a problem before anyone else, the only girls who seemed to be held in any sort of esteem by teachers were the "good" ones, who were docile, did what they were told and could be relied upon to babysit the class on the teacher’s day off. 

I remember the day I first heard about the Intel Science Talent Discovery Fair. Of course the school being what it was, I did not hear about it directly, but a rumor passing around the class that our chemistry teacher had asked two of her favorite students to prepare a project for entry in the fair. These students were, of course, boys. She even had the project they could do all picked out and had arranged with nearby institutes of higher learning for her students to conduct their experiments there. I remember seething inwardly at the unfairness of it all. Who was my chemistry teacher to decide who was worthy of creating such a project? I remember the biology class we had that day very clearly. Biology was by no means my favorite class at school. My biology teacher was a well-meaning and good-natured woman whose idea of teaching a class was to read from our textbook in a droning, monotonous voice. In this class she went up several points in my estimation, by first telling us about the upcoming competition and asking us to come and discuss any ideas we might have with her. Finally, someone who was willing to take a chance on us poor stupid people.

I wish I could say that I thought about possible ideas for a long time and carefully considered all the alternatives before plumping for one project. In reality, the day before the deadline for project proposal submission my dad and I came up with the idea of measuring pollution levels using some sort of bio-indicator. Some frenzied Googling later, I had decided upon my project. A few weeks later we got the happy news — my project, as well as three others from my school had been selected to proceed to the next stage of the competition — the regional finals.

I had a lot of fun doing that project. Peering through a microscope at tiny little pollen grains, travelling around the city to collect samples from the various pollution monitoring centers around the city, taking photographs, making a poster. In the end, both I, and another of the students our biology teacher had mentored got to go onto the next stage of the competition, the national finals, while the team that our chemistry teacher had handpicked did not make it. I’ve always seen it as a vindication of my biology’s teacher’s methods — offering guidance to any student who wanted to participate, not making the whole competition a semi-secret hush-hush thing and allowing students complete freedom to choose what the wanted to do. In the end, both I and the guy who also made it lost in the national finals, but the whole thing generated enough cred to make school much more bearable from then on.